Why does Disney keep doing this? My girlfriend is a Disney girl. She loves Disney movies. So, naturally, she wanted to see the new Moana, a remake of a movie Disney only made about a decade ago. It’s a recent enough movie that Dwayne Johnson can reprise the role of Maui in live action. I remember taking my nephews to see that one, and the animated sequel only came out about a year and a half ago. Look, these are old complaints of mine. Disney keeps making these things, and the best of them do sometimes do something good or worthwhile. A good remake, more than anything else, has to be good in such a way to justify its existence. What twist is the story going for this time?
I’m not sure what the answer is to this movie this time around.
Moana of Motunui (newcomer Catherine Laga’aia) is living on an Pacific island, a Polynesian girl whose father is the Chief (John Tui). However, Moana wants more than to stay on the island. She wants to know what is beyond the reef. That is against the rules, so when a blight hits both the coconuts and the fish supply, Moana feels there may be an answer beyond the island. Her father refuses to make that push, but her dying grandmother (Rena Owen) is another story, showing Moana a secret cave full of wayfarer vessels, showing her people used to sail extensively. Seeing as how Ocean appears to have given Moana the task of returning the Heart of Te Fiti to the goddess in question, she needs to first find and recruit demigod Maui (Johnson in a muscle suit to make himself look even bulkier) and get him to return the Heart that he stole in the first place one thousand years earlier.
Of course, it’s never that easy. Her only companion is a particularly stupid chicken, Maui is uninterested in helping at first, wanting just to be thanked for heroism he hasn’t performed in a millennium. There are various other dangers, such as a large, greedy crab (voiced by the other returning cast member, Jermaine Clement), hostile coconut people, or just the fact that Moana doesn’t exactly know how to sail a ship right away. But still, there are lives at stake, and Moana isn’t the type of girl to just give up and go home.
Does that basic plot description sound charming? It is. It’s basically identical to the original animated movie. It they made any changes between this adaptation and that animated original, I couldn’t tell you what they are. I mean, the songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda are still good, and I think that some of the musical moments, such as the opening song, actually works out pretty well. I wasn’t overly impressed by Laga’aia, but she has a good singing voice, and that is all an actress in these remakes usually needs in the end. Johnson is basically doing his Johnson thing again, and that usually works for me. But the one problem for me is a simple one: if the movie is a remake that is that close to the original, why bother? This movie is so unoriginal, it has no real purpose. It’s fine, but mostly because it is copying something that was, on its own, very good by itself. It’s, in my opinion, one of the most aggressively fine movies I’ve seen in a long time. It does everything it needs to, but it doesn’t challenge itself or the audience.
As it is, my girlfriend and I later saw a second movie, namely Everything Everywhere All at Once, and after a movie where everything felt as unoriginal as possible, we followed it up with one of the most original movies I could think of in a long time. Needless to say, I think we liked Everything Everywhere All at Once a lot more.
Grade: C+
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